Father Payne eBook

“Ah,” I said, “but that doesn’t
help me. You may have earned a holiday, but I
have never done any real drudgery—­I haven’t
earned anything.”

“Be content,” said Father Payne; “take
two changes of raiment! You have got your furrow
to plough—­all in good time! You are
working hard now, and don’t let me hear any
stuff about being ashamed because you enjoy it!
The reward of labour is life: to enjoy our work
is the secret. If you could persuade people that
the spring of life lies there, you would do more for
the happiness of man than by attending fifty thousand
committees. But I won’t talk any more.
I want to consider the lilies of the field, how they
grow. They don’t do it every day!”

LXIV

OF POSE

Someone said rashly, after dinner to-night, that the
one detestable and unpardonable thing in a man was
pose. A generalisation of this kind acted on
Father Payne very often like a ferret on a rabbit.
He had been mournfully abstracted during dinner, shaking
his head slowly, and turning his eyes to heaven when
he was asked leading questions. But now he said:
“I don’t think that is reasonable—­you
might as well say that you always disliked length
in a book. A book has got to be some length—­it
is as short as it’s long. Of course, the
moment you begin to say, ’How long this book
is!’ you mean that it is too long, and excess
is a fault. Do you remember the subject proposed
in a school debating society, ’That too much
athletics is worthy of our admiration’?
Pose is like that—­when you become conscious
of pose it is generally disagreeable—­that
is, if it is meant to deceive: but it is often
amusing too, like the pose of the unjust judge in the
parable, who prefaces his remarks by saying, ’Though
I fear not God, neither regard man.’”

“Oh, but you know what I mean, Father,”
said the speaker, “the pose of knowing when
you don’t know, and being well-bred when you
are snobbish, and being kind when you are mean, and
so on.”

“I think you mean humbug rather than pose,”
said Father Payne; “but even so, I don’t
agree with you. I have a friend who would be intolerable,
but for his pose of being agreeable. He isn’t
agreeable, and he doesn’t feel agreeable; but
he behaves as if he was, and it is the only thing that
makes him bearable. What you really mean is the
pose of superiority—­the man whose motives
are always just ahead of your own, and whose taste
is always slightly finer, and who knows the world
a little better. But there is a lot of pose that
isn’t that. What is pose, after all?
Can anyone define it?”

“It’s an artist’s phrase, I think,”
said Barthrop; “it means a position in which
you look your best.”